At least you don't mean you're out of tea bags! That would be worse. Although it's usually milk that I run out of, and so have to drink black coffee instead (as I don't like black tea). It's not the same.

My husband and I are apartment-hunting. Over the weekend we looked at several units in a new building that's just opening up. They're pricy, but still within our budget. In terms of location and amenities, the building has everything we want (and a couple ridiculous luxuries we'll probably never use--if anyone's dying to try a golf simulator, you're welcome to come over!) All of the units are very nice, but they all seem to have one trade-off. The smallest ones have a great view but are a little smaller than we'd like; we'd have to replace our couch with one that fits, we'd have to choose between a dining room table and a desk, and we might have to squeeze into one dresser instead of two. The next size up doesn't have a balcony, which is such a stupid thing to complain about but damnit, I like balconies, and so does my cat. He gets hours of entertainment from chasing bugs and chittering at birds out there, and I feel claustrophobic having to take an elevator to go outside. The next size up is huge, with a balcony, but it faces inward and gets very little light. This also feels like a stupid thing to complain about. But I've struggled with depression my whole life, and I've learned that sunshine is crucial for me. So we have some thinking to do, and some staggering first world privilege to reckon with.

Lack of natural light doesn't sound to me like a stupid thing to complain about at all. Some of us don't do well at all without it. And your need for the outdoor balcony space (not to mention the cat's need for it) may be part of the same thing. Not everyone is physically capable of living entirely indoors; at least, not while functioning well in either mood or concentration.

Unless that's the only space you can afford in an area that you absolutely have to live in, I'd be strongly inclined to agree with erwins, and to keep on looking.

We've looked at a few other buildings, none of which had everything we wanted in terms of being in a walkable neighborhood with easy subway access and parking for both of us--we could never get more than two out of three. Taking public transit to work isn't feasible for me, but is pretty much mandatory for him, except for the half a dozen times a year he needs to drive to Bakersfield or wherever for an early court appearance, which is why we need two cars. One of the buildings we looked at came with one parking space and had a Zipcar in the garage, which might have allowed us to get rid of his car, but there was still the issue of there not being much of a walkable neighborhood--no grocery stores for miles, very few restaurants, only one bar and one coffee shop within walking distance, and just not enough foot traffic to feel safe at night. A lot of the buildings we didn't bother checking out in person had tons of negative reviews for things like lack of maintenance, fire alarms going off at all hours, people not cleaning up after their dogs, etc. One older building seems to be undergoing renovations to put washer/dryers and recessed lighting in all the units, which sounds nice, but the residents report that this has meant years of water and electrical shutoffs with no warning.

I feel like it wasn't this hard to find a nice place when I lived in Boston and San Diego. But downtown and surrounding urban areas of LA seem to have been affected more by the white flight to the suburbs than at least those two cities. It’s only within the last decade or so that people who could afford to choose have been coming back to the city; the number of people living downtown has more than tripled in the last 20 years, with the most dramatic increase within the last 5-10 years. There's been an explosion of new development, but it's just barely keeping up. Growth has been somewhat limited by the need for cars; the subway system (yes, there is one!) covers only a small part of the city, though they're currently expanding it. Meanwhile, lots of up-and-coming neighborhoods still don't have a lot of the things you'd expect to have within walking distance in the heart of a major city. That place I mentioned without a grocery store apparently used to have a Wal-Mart up the street, but it closed years ago and nothing has taken its place. This new building we're considering will have a Target on the ground floor. It's also, like our current place, in Koreatown, which has been dense for decades and so has a lot of businesses and foot traffic, though parking is a challenge.

ETA: it also seems like at least a few of the other buildings in the area follow the same playbook where any one-bedroom that faces out or is high enough to get sunlight will be under a certain size, and the ground floor/interior units make up for it with more space.

I think that in that case, Esprise Me, I'd be inclined to go for the small apartment with the good windows and the balcony: on the grounds that the others would probably feel smaller to me in practice, due to the sense of claustrophobia.

My snow boots keep my feet warm and dry and are cute, but since I've been wearing them so much, and walking farther in them, the muscles at the front of my hips have been sore - and last night my lower back started hurting. I did 6 months of PT in 2015 to overcome nearly-debilitating chronic lower back pain, and have avoided major flareups since.

The obvious answer would be to use orthotics. I even have a custom pair. But I don't think they'll fit in these boots.

I got a blow-up T-rex costume for my birthday. It is always dark when I get home so I will have to wait till the weekend to chase the dogs around the back yard. I can tell you that the cats look upon it in unfavourable light.

I got a blow-up T-rex costume for my birthday. It is always dark when I get home so I will have to wait till the weekend to chase the dogs around the back yard. I can tell you that the cats look upon it in unfavourable light.

I love the topics of a certain podcast but the music and audio is so cheesy and low quality that I'm not sure I will be able to continue listening. One of the topics they mention is cheesy things with bad quality so I have to wonder why someone on their team (and I think it's a relatively large one) didn't say, "Hey, maybe we should just talk normally! And instead of adding music and sound effects and so forth maybe we should just make the audio of that talking sound good." (Not that we can talk; I mean, we've made our share of bad audio. But I think we can definitely make better audio than that on their budget and crew size!) Anyway, it's almost unlistenable.

We ended up getting into an argument about this last night. It's not the first argument we've had on the subject, but this is the only subject I think we've argued about since getting married a little over a year ago. I came home from work and he started telling me how stressed out he was over this decision; I hugged him and told him it was stressing me out too. Then he kind of turned on me and accused me of not being willing to compromise.

That upset me because I feel I have been compromising left and right. He picked out our current place for himself 3.5 years ago; when I moved in a year later, we agreed that we'd move to a nicer place once I got a job up here. But then I got a job, and he kept coaxing me to extend our lease just a little longer. We were saving so much money! I paid off my credit cards from law school, paid for our honeymoon, and put away substantial savings; he paid off his student loans, replaced the car he totaled, and started a 401k. We were saving so much time and hassle not having to move and learn our way around a new neighborhood, and while we couldn't entertain at our place, that kinda saved time too. I was able to put in the 80 hours a week it took to succeed at my new job, and he was able to do more around the house so I didn't have to. We were eventually able to rent a second parking space from a neighbor who didn't have a car, so we had the both the car and subway access he needed. But he knew I hated living here. I missed throwing parties, I missed having natural light, and I missed being able to cook (our kitchen is deep in our unit, the fan is ineffectual, and even with opening all the windows and doors we have to disconnect the smoke alarm before using the stove.) We also dealt with roaches, leaks, numerous unexplained water shutoffs, and a period of serveral weeks without hot water to the entire building when the boiler went out. The elevator broke down about once a month for a week or more at a time for the better part of a year, nonessential construction was carried out with no notice of the impeded access, and the hot tub they installed a year ago has never worked. Our upstairs neighbor overwaters his plants while we sit on the balcony below, leading to muddy water showering down on our heads, and he cuts his sappy plants which drip onto my cat's fur, forcing me to hold him down and cut out the resulting mats. Holes appear in the walls of the stairwell and don't get fixed for months. One time someone's dog took a dump on the carpet in the hallway right outside our front door, and they just left it there. I've put up with this for two and a half years now, all of which time we could afford better. That alone is a huge compromise.

I finally put my foot down and refused to sign another extension of our lease. He agreed to move, but then kept trying to reopen the conversation again, arguing about how convenient and cheap our place was. I told him I was moving; he could stay (and keep the furniture) if moving caused him too much anxiety, and we could try keeping separate households for a while. He's adamantly opposed to this. But he's also treating my priorities as negotiable and his as necessities. I don't need to live on the subway line, and I'd certainly be fine with living a mile away from the nearest stop; he rejected a place that was half a mile from the subway. Fine, I stopped suggesting places more than a third of a mile from a subway station. He didnít want to live in a neighborhood without a regular grocery store within a half mile walk; I ruled out Chinatown, the area around Union Station, and several other areas. He wants in-unit washer and dryer; I'd be fine with just having them in the building, but whatever, I didn't argue. He now tells me he needs a desk with an external monitor for his weekly telecommmute day (even though he rarely does any work on that day); OK, I'd reject that small apartment that was otherwise perfect and keep looking. But my desire for natural light, a balcony, and a dining room table/space to entertain friends? Totally unreasonable, apparently.